The subject invention relates to planting machines which will plant individual growing plants such as seedlings which have been grown to the seedling stage from seed in a greenhouse and are ready for out-planting in some pattern of parallel rows with a predetermined spacing between each of the plants in each row. The invention is further concerned partially with plants that must be planted to a considerable depth in the open ground, plants for example such as conifer seedlings having a root area that is at least 6 inches in length.
The most common prior art machines for such out-plantings generally involve a furrow opening plow preceding a person supported above the furrow, who deposits plants in the opened furrow, and with some furrow closing or tamping means following thereafter to complete the plantings. Some further prior machines include automatic means for depositing individual plants through a plant holding mechanism into the opened furrow. A number of other prior art machines do not require the openings of a furrow for reception of the plant, but are intended to insert a plant or cartridge by either opening a hole, dropping the plant therein and reclosing the hole about the plant or by pushing the seedling in a cartridge into the ground. A number of the prior art machines which simply inject a plant or cartridge into the ground use a ground wheel drive to operate the planting mechanism.
It appears that in prior art ground wheel controlled or driven machines which do not first open a furrow, but which simply inject the plant, that the specific cyclical motion produced by the ground wheel drive is disregarded with the result that the planting tool in entering and retracting from the ground plows or opens a hole substantially larger than the plant thereby requiring substantial tamping or replacement of soil about the inserted plant.